he body of Teddy Adams was gone, the grieving relatives too.

Lon Sellitto had just left for Rhyme's and the scene was officially released. Ron Pulaski, Nancy Simpson and Frank Rettig were removing the crime scene tape.

Still stung by the look of desperate hope in the face of Adams's young niece, Amelia Sachs had gone over the scene yet again with even more diligence than usual. She checked other doorways and possible entrance and escape routes the perp might've used. But she found nothing else. She didn't remember the last time a complicated crime like this had yielded so little evidence.

After packing up her equipment she mentally shifted back to the Benjamin Creeley case and called the man's wife, Suzanne, to tell her that several men had broken into their Westchester house.

"I didn't know that. Do have any idea what they stole?"

Sachs had met the woman several times. She was very thin — she jogged daily — and had short frosted hair, a pretty face. "It didn't look like much was missing." She decided to say nothing about the neighbor boy; she figured she'd scared him into going straight.

Sachs asked if anyone would have been burning something in the fireplace, and Suzanne replied that no one had even been to the house recently.

"What do you think was going on?"

"I don't know. But it's making the suicide look more doubtful. Oh, by the way, you need a new lock on your back door."

"I'll call somebody today... Thank you, Detective. It means a lot that you believe me. About Ben not killing himself."

After they hung up, Sachs filled out a request for analysis of the ash, mud and other evidence at the Creeleys' house and packed these materials separately from the Watchmaker evidence. She then completed the chain-of-custody cards and helped Simpson and Rettig pack up the van. It took two of them to wrap the heavy metal bar in plastic and stow it.

She was just swinging shut the van's door when she glanced up, across the street. The cold had driven off most of the spectators but she noted a man standing with a Post in front of an old building being renovated on Cedar Street, near Chase Plaza.

That's not right, Sachs thought. Nobody stands on the street corner and reads a newspaper in this weather. If you're worried about the stock market or curious about a recent disaster, you flip through quickly, find out how much money you lost or how far the church bus plummeted and then keep on walking.

But you don't just stand in the windy street for Page Six gossip.

She couldn't see the man clearly — he was partially hidden behind the newspaper and a pile of debris from the construction site. But one thing was obvious: his boots. They'd have a traction tread, which could have left the distinctive impressions she found in the snow at the mouth of the alley.

Sachs debated. Most of the other officers had left. Simpson and Rettig were armed but not tactically trained and the suspect was on the other side of a three-foot-high metal barricade set up for an upcoming parade. He could escape easily if she approached him from where she was now, across the street. She'd have to handle the take-down more subtly.

She walked up to Pulaski, whispered, "There's somebody at your six o'clock. I want to talk to him. Guy with the paper."

"The perp?" he asked.

"Don't know. Maybe. Here's what we're going to do. I'm getting into the RRV with the CS team. They're going to drop me at the corner to the east. Can you drive a manual?"

"Sure."

She gave him the keys to her bright red Camaro. "You drive west on Cedar toward Broadway, maybe forty feet. Stop fast, get out and vault the barricade, come back this way."

"Flush him."

"Right. If he's just out reading the paper, we'll have a talk, check his ID and get back to work. If not, I'm guessing he'll turn and run right into my arms. You come up behind and cover me."

"Got it."

Sachs made a show of taking a last look around the scene and then climbed into the big brown RRV van. She leaned forward. "We've got a problem."

Nancy Simpson and Frank Rettig glanced toward her. Simpson unzipped her jacket and put her hand on the grip of her pistol.

"No, don't need that. I'll tell you what's going down." She explained the situation then said to Simpson, who was behind the wheel, "Head east. At the light make a left. Just slow up. I'll jump out."

Pulaski climbed into the Camaro, fired it up and couldn't resist pumping the gas to get a sexy whine out of the Tubi exhausts.

Rettig asked, "You don't want us to stop?"

"No, just slow up. I want the suspect to be sure I'm leaving."

"Okay," Simpson said. "You got it."

The RRV headed east. In the sideview mirror Sachs saw Pulaski start forward — easy, she told him silently; it was a monster engine and the clutch gripped like Velcro. But he controlled the horses and rolled forward smoothly, the opposite direction from the van.

At the intersection of Cedar and Nassau the RRV turned and Sachs opened the door. "Keep going. Don't slow up."

Simpson did a great job keeping the van steady. "Good luck," the crime scene officer called.

Sachs leapt out.

Whoa, a little faster than she'd planned. She nearly stumbled, caught herself and thanked the Department of Sanitation for the generous sprinkling of salt on the icy street. She started along the sidewalk, coming up behind the man with the newspaper. He didn't see her.

A block away, then a half block. She opened her jacket and gripped the Glock that rode high on her belt. About fifty feet past the suspect, Pulaski suddenly pulled to the curb, climbed out and — without the guy's noticing — easily jumped over the barricade. They had him sandwiched in, separated by a barrier on one side and the building being renovated on the other.

A good plan.

Except for one glitch.

Across the street from Sachs were two armed guards, stationed in front of the Housing and Urban Development building. They'd been helping with the crime scene and one of them glanced at Sachs. He waved to her, calling, "Forget something, Detective?"

Shit. The man with the newspaper whirled around and saw her.

He dropped the paper, jumped the barrier and sprinted as fast as he could down the middle of the street toward Broadway, catching Pulaski on the other side of the metal fence. The rookie tried to leap it, caught his foot and went down hard in the street. Sachs paused but saw he wasn't badly hurt and she continued after the suspect. Pulaski rolled to his feet and together they sprinted after the man, who had a thirty-foot head start and was increasing his lead.

She grabbed her walkie-talkie and pressed TRANSMIT. "Detective Five Eight Eight Five," she gasped. "In foot pursuit of a suspect in that homicide near Cedar Street. Suspect is heading west on Cedar, wait, now south on Broadway. Need backup."

"Roger, Five Eight Eight Five. Directing units to your location."

Several other RMPs — radio mobile patrols, squad cars — responded that they were nearby and en route to cut off the suspect's escape.

As Sachs and Pulaski approached Battery Park, the man suddenly stopped, nearly stumbling. He glanced to his right — at the subway.

No, not the train, she thought. Too many bystanders in close proximity.

Don't do it...

Another glance over his shoulder and he plunged down the stairs.

She stopped, calling to Pulaski, "Go after him." A deep breath. "If he shoots, check your backdrop real carefully. Let him go rather than fire if there's any doubt at all."

His face uneasy, the rookie nodded. Sachs knew he'd never been in a firefight. He called, "Where're you —"

"Just go!" she shouted.

The rookie took a breath and started sprinting again. Sachs ran to the subway entrance and watched Pulaski descend three steps at a time. Then she crossed the street and trotted a half block south. She drew her gun and stepped behind a newsstand.

Counting down... four... three... two...

One.

She stepped out, turning to the subway exit, just as the suspect sprinted up the stairs. She trained the gun on him. "Don't move."

Passersby were screaming and dropping to the ground. The suspect's reaction, though, was simply disgust, presumably that his trick hadn't worked. Sachs had thought he might be coming this way. The surprise in his eyes when he saw the subway could've been phony, she'd decided. It told her that maybe he'd been making for the station all along — as a possible feint. He raised his hands lethargically.

"On the ground, face down."

"Come on. I —"

"Now!" she snapped.

He glanced at her gun and then complied. Winded from the run, her joints in pain, she dropped a knee into the middle of his back to cuff him. He winced. Sachs didn't care. She was just in one of those moods.

"They got a suspect. At the scene."

Lincoln Rhyme and the man who delivered this interesting news were sitting in his lab. Dennis Baker, fortyish, compact and handsome, was a supervisory lieutenant in Major Cases — Sellitto's division — and had been ordered by City Hall to make sure the Watchmaker was stopped as fast as possible. He'd been one of those who'd "insisted" that Sellitto get Rhyme and Sachs on the case.

Rhyme lifted an eyebrow. Suspect? Criminals often did return to the scene of the crime, for various reasons, and Rhyme wondered if Sachs had actually collared the killer.

Baker turned back to his cell phone, listening and nodding. The lieutenant — who bore an uncanny resemblance to the actor George Clooney — had that focused, humorless quality that makes for an excellent police administrator but a tedious drinking buddy.

"He's a good guy to have on your side," Sellitto had said of Baker just before the man arrived from One Police Plaza.

"Fine, but is he going to meddle?" Rhyme had asked the rumpled detective.

"Not so's you'd notice."

"Meaning?"

"He wants a big win under his belt and he thinks you can deliver it. He'll give you all the slack — and support — you need."

Which was good, because they were down some manpower. There was another NYPD detective who often worked with them, Roland Bell, a transplant from the South. The detective had an easy-going manner, very different from Rhyme's, though an equally methodical nature. Bell was on vacation with his two sons down in North Carolina, visiting his girlfriend, a local sheriff in the Tarheel State.

They also often worked with an FBI agent, renowned for his antiterrorism and undercover work, Fred Dellray. Murders of this sort aren't usually federal crimes but Dellray often helped Sellitto and Rhyme on homicides and would make the resources of the Bureau available without the typical red tape. But the Feds had their hands full with several massive Enron-style corporate fraud investigations that were just getting under way. Dellray was stuck on one of these.

Hence, Baker's presence — not to mention his influence at the Big Building — was a godsend. Sellitto now disconnected his cell phone call and explained that Sachs was interviewing the suspect at the moment, though he wasn't being very cooperative.

Sellitto was sitting next to Mel Cooper, the slightly built, ballroom-dancing forensic technician that Rhyme insisted on using. Cooper suffered for his brilliance as a crime scene lab man; Rhyme called him at all hours to run the technical side of his cases. He'd hesitated a bit when Rhyme called him at the lab in Queens that morning, explaining that he'd planned to take his girlfriend and his mother to Florida for the weekend.

Rhyme's response was, "All the more incentive to get here as soon as possible, wouldn't you say?"

"I'll be there in a half hour." He was now at an examination table in the lab, awaiting the evidence. With a latex-gloved hand, he fed some biscuits to Jackson; the dog was curled up at his feet.

"If there's any canine hair contamination," Rhyme grumbled, "I won't be happy."

"He's pretty cute," Cooper said, swapping gloves.

The criminalist grunted. "Cute" was not a word that figured in the Lincoln Rhyme dictionary.

Sellitto's phone rang again and he took the call, then disconnected. "The vic at the pier — Coast Guard and our divers haven't found any bodies yet. Still checking missing persons reports."

Just then Crime Scene arrived and Thom helped an officer cart in the evidence from the scenes Sachs had just run.

About time...

Baker and Cooper lugged in a heavy, plastic-wrapped metal bar.

The murder weapon in the alleyway killing.

The CS officer handed over chain-of-custody cards, which Cooper signed. The man said good-bye but Rhyme didn't acknowledge him. The criminalist was looking at the evidence. This was the moment that he lived for. After the spinal cord accident, his passion — really an addiction — for the sport of going one-on-one with perps continued undiminished, and the evidence from crimes was the field on which this game was played.

He felt eager anticipation.

And guilt too.

Because he wouldn't be filled with this exhilaration if not for someone else's loss: the victim on the pier and Theodore Adams, their families and friends. Oh, he felt sympathy for their sorrow, sure. But he was able to wrap up the sense of tragedy and put it somewhere. Some people called him cold, insensitive, and he supposed he was. But those who excel in a field do so because a number of disparate traits happen to come together within them. And Rhyme's sharp mind and relentless drive and impatience happened to coincide with the emotional distance that is a necessary attribute of the best criminalists.

He was squinting, gazing at the boxes, when Ron Pulaski arrived. Rhyme had first met him when the young man had been on the force only a short time. Although that was a year earlier — and Pulaski was a family man with two children — Rhyme couldn't stop thinking of him as the "rookie." Some nicknames you just can't shake.

Rhyme announced, "I know Amelia has somebody in custody but in case it isn't the perp, I don't want to lose time." He turned to Pulaski. "Give me the lay of the land. First scene, the pier."

"All right," he began uneasily. "The pier is located approximately at Twenty-second Street in the Hudson River. It extends into the river fifty-two feet at a height of eighteen feet above the surface of the water. The murder —"

"So they've recovered the body?"

"I don't think so."

"Then you meant apparent murder?"

"Right. Yessir. The apparent murder occurred at the far end of the pier, that is, the west end, sometime between six last night and six this morning. The dock was closed then."

There was very little evidence: just the fingernail, probably a man's, the blood, which Mel Cooper tested and found to be human and type AB positive, which meant that both A and B antigens — proteins — were present in the victim's plasma, and neither anti-A nor anti-B antigens were. In addition a separate protein, Rh, was present. The combination of AB antigens and Rh positive made the victim's the third-rarest blood type, accounting for about 3.5 percent of the population. Further tests confirmed that the victim was a male.

In addition, they concluded that he was probably older and had coronary problems since he was taking an anticoagulant — a blood thinner. There were no traces of other drugs or indications of infection or disease in the blood.

There were no fingerprints, trace or footprints at the scene and no tire tread marks nearby, other than those left by employees' vehicles.

Sachs had collected a piece of the chain link and Cooper examined the cut edges, learning that the perp had used what seemed to be standard wire cutters to get through the fence. The team could match these marks with those made by a tool if they found one but there was no way to trace the cutter back to its source by the impressions alone.

Rhyme looked over the pictures of the scene, particularly the pattern the blood had made as it flowed onto the pier. He guessed that the victim had been hanging over the edge of the deck, at chest level, his fingers desperately wedged into the space between the planks. The fingernail marks showed that eventually he'd lost his grip. Rhyme wondered how long the vic had been able to hang on.

He nodded slowly. "Tell me about the next scene."

Pulaski replied, "All right, that homicide occurred in an alley off Cedar Street, near Broadway. This alley featured a dead end. It was fifteen feet wide and one hundred and four feet long and was surfaced with cobblestones."

The body, Rhyme recalled, was fifteen feet from the mouth of the alley.

"What's the time of death?"

"At least eight hours before he was found, the ME tour doc said. The body was frozen solid so it'll take a while to determine with any certainty." The young officer suffered from the habit of copspeak.

"Amelia told me about the service and fire doors in the alley. Did anybody ask what time they were locked for the night?"

"Three of the buildings're commercial. Two of them lock their service doors at eight thirty and one at ten. The other's a government administration building. That door's locked at six. There's a late-night garbage pickup at ten."

"Body discovered when?"

"Around seven A.M."

"Okay, the vic in the alley was dead at least eight hours, last door was locked at ten and garbage picked up then. So the killing took place between, say, ten fifteen and eleven P.M. Parking situation?"

"I got the license plates of every car in a two-block radius." Pulaski was holding up a Moby-Dick of a notebook.

"What the hell's that?"

"Oh, I wrote down notes about all the cars. Thought it might be helpful. You know, where they were parked, anything suspicious about them."

"Waste of time. We just needed the tag numbers for names and addresses," Rhyme explained. "To cross-check DMV with NCIC and the other databases. We don't care who needed bodywork or had bald tires or a crack pipe in the backseat... Well, did you?"

"What?"

"Run the tags?"

"Not yet."

Cooper went online but found no warrants on any of the registered owners of the cars. At Rhyme's instruction he also checked to see if any parking tickets were issued in that area around the time of the killing. There were none.

"Mel, run the vic's name. Warrants? Anything else about him?"

There were no state warrants on Theodore Adams, and Pulaski recounted what his sister had said about him — that he apparently had no enemies or personal life issues that might result in his murder.

"Why these vics, though?" Rhyme asked. "Are they random?... I know Dellray's busy but this's important. Give him a call and have him run Adams's name. See if the feds have anything on him."

Sellitto made a call to the federal building and got through to Dellray — who was in a bad mood because of the "fucking quagmire" of a financial fraud case he'd been assigned. Still, he managed to look through the federal databases and active case files. But the results were negative on Theodore Adams.

"Okay," Rhyme announced, "until we find something else let's assume they're random victims of a crazy man." He squinted at the pictures. "Where the hell're the clocks?"

A call to the bomb squad revealed that they'd been cleared of any bio or toxic threat and were on their way to Rhyme's right now.

The cash in the faux gold money clip appeared fresh out of an ATM machine. The bills were clean but Cooper found some good prints on the clip. Unfortunately, when he ran them through IAFIS, the FBI's Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, there were no hits. The few prints on the cash in Adams's pocket came back negative as well, and the serial numbers revealed the bills hadn't been flagged by the Treasury Department for possible involvement in money laundering or other crimes.

"The sand?" Rhyme asked, referring to the obscuring agent.

"Generic," Cooper called, not looking up from the microscope. "Sort used in playgrounds rather than construction. I'll check it for other trace."

And no sand at the pier, Rhyme recalled Sachs telling him. Was that because, as she'd speculated, the perp was planning to return to the alley? Or simply because the substance wasn't needed on the pier, where the brutal wind from the Hudson would sweep the scene clean?

"What about the span?" Rhyme asked.

"The what?"

"The bar the vic's neck was crushed with. It's a needle-eye span." Rhyme had made a study of construction materials in the city, since a popular way to dispose of bodies was to dump them at job sites. Cooper and Sellitto weighed the length of metal — it was eighty-one pounds — and got it onto the examining table. The span was about six feet long, an inch wide and three inches high. A hole was drilled in each end. "They're used mostly in shipbuilding, heavy equipment, cranes, antennas and bridges."

"That's gotta be the heaviest murder weapon I've ever seen," Cooper said.

"Heavier than a Suburban?" asked Lincoln Rhyme, the man for whom precision was everything. He was referring to the case of the wife who'd run over her philandering husband with a very large SUV in the middle of Third Avenue several months earlier.

"Oh, that... his cheatin' heart," Cooper sang in a squeaky tenor. Then he tested for fingerprints and found none. He filed off some shavings from the rod. "Probably iron. I see evidence of oxidation." A chemical test revealed that this was the case.

"No identifying markings?"

"Nope."

Rhyme grimaced. "That's a problem. There've got to be fifty sources in the metro area... Wait. Amelia said there was some construction nearby —"

"Oh," Pulaski said, "she had me check there and they weren't using any metal bars like that. I forgot to mention it."

"You forgot," Rhyme muttered. "Well, I know the city's doing some major work on the Queensboro Bridge. Let's give 'em a try." Rhyme said to Pulaski, "Call the work crew at the Queensboro and find out if spans're being used there and, if so, are any missing."

The rookie nodded and pulled out his mobile phone.

Cooper looked over the analysis of the sand. "Okay, got something here. Thallium sulfate."

"What's that?" Sellitto asked.

"Rodent poison," said Rhyme. "It's banned in this country but you sometimes find it in immigrant communities or in buildings where immigrants work. How concentrated?"

"Very... and there's none in the control soil and residue that Amelia collected. Which means it's probably from someplace the perp's been."

"Maybe he's planning to kill somebody with it," Pulaski suggested, as he waited on hold.

Rhyme shook his head. "Not likely. It's not easy to administer and you need a high dosage for humans. But it could lead us to him. Find out if there've been any recent confiscations or environmental agency complaints in the city."

Cooper made the calls.

"Let's look at the duct tape," Rhyme instructed.

The tech examined the rectangles of shiny gray tape, which had been used to bind the victim's hands and feet and gag him. He announced that the tape was generic, sold in thousands of home improvement, drug and grocery stores around the country. Testing the adhesive on the tape revealed very little trace, just a few grains of snow-removal salt, which matched samples Sachs had taken from the general area, and the sand that the Watchmaker had spread to help him clean up trace.

Disappointed that the duct tape wasn't more helpful, Rhyme turned to the photos Sachs had shot of Adams's body. Then he wheeled closer to the examination table and peered at the screen. "Look at the edges of the tape."

"Interesting," Cooper said, glancing from the digital photos to the tape itself.

What had struck the men as odd was that the pieces of tape had been cut with extreme precision and applied very carefully. Usually it was just torn off the roll, sometimes ripped by the attacker's teeth (which often left DNA-laden saliva), and wrapped sloppily around the victim's hands, ankles and mouth. But the strips used by the Watchmaker were perfectly cut with a sharp object. The lengths were identical.

Ron Pulaski hung up, then announced, "They don't use needle-eye spans on the work they're doing now on the bridge."

Well, Rhyme hadn't expected easy answers.

"And the rope he was holding on to?"

Cooper looked it over, examined some databases. He shook his head. "Generic."

Rhyme nodded at several whiteboards that stood empty in the corner of the lab. "Start our charts. You, Ron, you have good handwriting?"

"It's good enough."

"That's all we need. Write."

When running cases Rhyme kept charts of all the evidence they found. They were like crystal balls to him; he'd stare at the words and photos and diagrams to try to understand who the perp might be, where he was hiding, where he was going to strike next. Gazing at his evidence boards was the closest Lincoln Rhyme ever came to meditating.

"We'll use his name as the heading, since he was so courteous to let us know what he wants to be called."

As Pulaski wrote what Rhyme dictated, Cooper picked up a tube containing a tiny sample of what seemed to be soil. He looked it over through the microscope, starting on 4x power (the number-one rule with optical scopes is to start low; if you go right to higher magnifications you'll end up looking at artistically interesting but forensically useless abstract images).

"Looks like your basic soil. I'll see what else's in it." He prepared a sample for the chromatograph/mass spectrometer, a large instrument that separates and identifies substances in trace evidence.

When the results were ready Cooper looked over the computer screen and announced, "Okay, we've got some oils, nitrogen, urea, chloride... and protein. Let me run the profile." A moment later his computer filled with additional information. "Fish protein."

"So maybe the perp works in a fish restaurant," Pulaski said enthusiastically. "Or a fish stand in Chinatown. Or, wait, maybe the fish counter at a grocery store."

Rhyme asked, "Ron, you ever hear a public speaker say, 'Before I begin, I'd like to say something'?"

"Uhm. I think."

"Which is a little odd, because if he's talking he's already begun, right?"

Pulaski lifted an eyebrow.

"My point is that in analyzing the evidence you do something before you start."

"Which is what?"

"Find out where the evidence came from. Now, where did Sachs collect the fish protein dirt?"

He looked at the tag. "Oh."

"Where is 'oh'?"

"Inside the victim's jacket."

"So whom does the evidence tell us something about?"

"The victim, not the perp."

"Exactly! Is it helpful to know that he has it in his jacket, not on? Who knows? Maybe it will be. But the important point is to not blindly send the troops to every fishmonger in the city too fast. You comfortable with that theory, Ron?"

"Real comfortable."

"I'm so pleased. Write down the fishy soil under the victim's profile and let's get on with it, shall we? When's the medical examiner sending us a report?"

Cooper said, "Could be a while. Coming up on Christmastime."

Sellitto sang, "'Tis the season to be killing..."

Pulaski gave a frown. Rhyme explained to him, "The deadliest times of the year are hot spells and holidays. Remember, Ron: Stress doesn't kill people; people kill people — but stress makes 'em do it."

"Got fibers here, brown," Cooper announced. He glanced at the notes attached to the bag. "Back heel of the victim's shoe and his wristwatch band."

"What kind of fibers?"

Cooper examined them closely and ran the profile through the FBI's fiber database. "Automotive, it looks like."

"Makes sense he'd have a car — you can't really carry an eighty-one-pound iron bar around on the subway. So our Watchmaker parked in the front part of the alley and dragged the vic to his resting place. What can we tell about the vehicle?"

Not much, as it turned out. The fiber was from carpet used in more than forty models of cars, trucks and SUVs. As for tread marks, the part of the alley where he'd parked was covered with salt, which had interfered with the tires' contact with the cobblestones and prevented the transfer of tread marks.

"A big zero in the vehicle department. Well, let's look at his love note."

Cooper slipped the white sheet of paper out of a plastic envelope.!!!The full Cold Moon is in the sky,

shining on the corpse of earth,

signifying the hour to die

and end the journey begun at birth.

— THE WATCHMAKER

"Is it?" Rhyme asked.

"Is it what?" Pulaski asked, as if he'd missed something.

"The full moon. Obviously. Today."

Pulaski flipped through Rhyme's New York Times. "Yep. Full."

"What's he mean by the Cold Moon in caps?" Dennis Baker asked.

Cooper did some searching on the Internet. "Okay, it's a month in the lunar calendar... We use the solar calendar, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, based on the sun. The lunar calendar marks time from new moon to new moon. The names of the months describe the cycle of our lives from birth to death. They're named according to milestones in the year: the Strawberry Moon in the spring, the Harvest Moon and Hunter Moon in the fall. The Cold Moon is in December, the month of hibernation and death."

As Rhyme had noted earlier, killers referencing the moon or astrological themes tended to be serial perps. There was some literature suggesting that people were actually motivated by the moon to commit crimes but Rhyme believed that was simply the influence of suggestion — like the increase in alien abduction reports just after Steven Spielberg's film Close Encounters of the Third Kind was released.

"Run the name Watchmaker through the databases, along with 'Cold Moon.' Oh, and the other lunar months too."

After ten minutes of searching through the FBI's Violent Criminal Apprehension Program and the National Crime Information Center, as well as state databases, they had no hits.

Rhyme asked Cooper to find out where the poem itself had come from but he found nothing even close in dozens of poetry websites. The tech also called a professor of literature at New York University, a man who helped them on occasion. He'd never heard of it. And the poem was either too obscure to turn up in a search engine or more likely it was the Watchmaker's own creation.

Cooper said, "As for the note itself, it's generic paper from a computer printer. Hewlett-Packard LaserJet ink, nothing distinctive."

Rhyme shook his head, frustrated at the absence of leads. If the Watchmaker was in fact a cyclical killer he could be somewhere right now, checking out — or even murdering — his next victim.

A moment later Amelia Sachs arrived, pulled off her jacket. She was introduced to Dennis Baker, who told her he was glad she was on the case; her reputation preceded her, the wedding-ring-free cop added, smiling a bit of flirt her way. Sachs responded with a brisk, professional handshake. All in a day's work for a woman on the force.

Rhyme briefed her on what they'd learned from the evidence so far.

"Not much," she muttered. "He's good."

"What's the story on the suspect?" Baker asked.

Sachs nodded toward the door. "He'll be here in a minute. He took off when we tried to get him but I don't think he's our boy. I checked him out. Married, been a broker with the same firm for five years, no warrants. I don't even think he could carry it." She nodded at the iron span.

There was a knock on the door.

Behind her, two uniformed officers brought in an unhappy-looking man in handcuffs. Ari Cobb was in his midthirties, good-looking in a dime-a-dozen businessman way. The slightly built man was wearing a nice coat, probably cashmere, though it was stained with what looked like street sludge, presumably from his arrest.

"What's the story?" Sellitto asked him gruffly.

"As I told her" — a cool nod toward Sachs — "I was just walking to the subway on Cedar Street last night and I dropped some money. That's it right there." He nodded toward the bills and money clip. "This morning I realized what happened and came back to look for it. I saw the police there. I don't know, I just didn't want to get involved. I'm a broker. I have clients who're real sensitive about publicity. It could hurt my business." It was only then that the man seemed to realize that Rhyme was in a wheelchair. He blinked once, got over it, and resumed his indignant visage once more.

A search of his clothing found none of the fine-grained sand, blood or other trace to link him to the killings. Like Sachs, Rhyme doubted this was the Watchmaker, but given the gravity of the crimes he wasn't going to be careless. "Print him," Rhyme ordered.

Cooper did so and found that the friction ridges on the money clip were his. A check of DMV revealed that Cobb didn't own a car, and a call to his credit card companies showed that he hadn't rented one recently using his plastic.

"When did you drop the money?" Sellitto asked.

He explained that he'd left work about seven thirty the previous night. He'd had some drinks with friends, then left about nine and walked to the subway. He remembered pulling a subway pass out of his pocket when he was walking along Cedar, which was probably when he lost the clip. He continued on to the station and returned home, the Upper East Side, about 9:45. His wife was on a business trip so he went to a bar near his apartment for dinner by himself. He got home about eleven.

Sellitto made some calls to check out his story. The night guard at his office confirmed he'd left at seven thirty, a credit card receipt showed he was at a bar down on Water Street around nine, and the doorman in his building and a neighbor confirmed that he had returned to his apartment at the time that he said. It seemed impossible for him to have abducted two victims, killed one at the pier and then arranged the death of Theodore Adams in the alley, all between nine fifteen and eleven.

Sellitto said, "We're investigating a very serious crime here. It happened near where you were last night. Did you notice anything that could help us?"

"No, nothing at all. I swear I'd help if I could."

"The killer could be going to strike again, you know."

"I'm sorry about that," he said, not sounding very sorry at all. "But I panicked. That's not a crime."

Sellitto glanced at his guards. "Take him outside for a minute."

After he was gone, Baker muttered, "Waste of time."

Sachs shook her head. "He knows something. I've got a hunch."

Rhyme deferred to Sachs when it came to what he called — with some condescension — the "people" side of being a cop: witnesses, psychology and, God forbid, hunches.

"Okay," he said. "But what do we do with your hunch?"

It wasn't Sachs who responded, though, but Lon Sellitto. He said, "Got an idea." He opened his jacket, revealing an impossibly wrinkled shirt, and fished out his cell phone.